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How BioWare's Anthem Went Wrong
Concept art from Anthem
It wasn’t even supposed to be called Anthem. Just days before the annual E3 convention in June of 2017, when the storied studio BioWare would reveal its newest game, the plan had been to go with a different title: Beyond. They’d even printed out Beyond T-shirts for the staff.
Then, less than a week before the Los Angeles press conference held by BioWare’s parent company, Electronic Arts, word came down that securing the rights to the trademark would be too difficult. Beyond was ruled out. The leadership team quickly switched to one of their backup options, Anthem. But whereas Beyond had been indicative of what BioWare hoped the game would be—you’d go out beyond the walls of your fort and into the dangerous wilds around you—Anthem didn’t really mean much.
“Everybody was like, ‘Well, that doesn’t make any sense—what does this have to do with anything?’” said one person who worked on the game. Just days before their game’s announcement, the team at BioWare had a brand new name that nobody really understood.
Such a major last-minute upheaval might seem strange to an outside observer, but on Anthem, it was common. Very few things went right in the development of BioWare’s latest game, an online cooperative shooter that was first teased in mid-2012 but spent years floundering in pre-production. Many features weren’t finalized or implemented until the very final months, and to some who worked on the project, it wasn’t even clear what kind of game Anthem even was until that E3 demo in June of 2017, less than two years before it actually came out. Later, they came up with an explanation for the name: The game’s planet was enveloped by something called the Anthem of Creation, a powerful, mysterious force that left environmental cataclysms across the world.
When Anthem launched in February of 2019, it was panned by fans and critics. Today, it has a 55 on the review aggregation site Metacritic, BioWare’s lowest score since the company was founded in 1995. The developer once known for ambitious role-playing games like Dragon Age and the original Mass Effect trilogy has now released two critical flops in a row, following 2017's disappointing Mass Effect: Andromeda. Although hardcore fans have put their faith in BioWare to continue fixing Anthem’s bugs and improving its mechanics—especially since Bungie’s Destiny, a similar game, had a rough launch and eventually recovered—few were happy with the initial release. Anthem wasn’t just buggy and thin on content; it felt half-baked, like it hadn’t been play-tested and tweaked enough by developers with experience playing other loot shooters. In the weeks after launch, there appeared to be a major new problem every day.
Fans have speculated endlessly as to how Anthem went so awry. Was it originally a single-player role-playing game, like BioWare’s previous titles? Did EA force BioWare to make a Destiny clone? Did they strip out all of the good missions to sell later as downloadable content? Is the loot system secretly driven by an elaborate AI system that keeps track of everything you do so it can get you to spend more money on the game?
The answer to all of those questions is no.
This account of Anthem’s development, based on interviews with 19 people who either worked on the game or adjacent to it (all of whom were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about Anthem’s development), is a story of indecision and mismanagement. It’s a story of technical failings, as EA’s Frostbite engine continued to make life miserable for many of BioWare’s developers, and understaffed departments struggled to serve their team’s needs. It’s a story of two studios, one in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and another in Austin, Texas, that grew resentful toward one another thanks to a tense, lopsided relationship. It’s a story of a video game that was in development for nearly seven years but didn’t enter production until the final 18 months, thanks to big narrative reboots, major design overhauls, and a leadership team said to be unable to provide a consistent vision and unwilling to listen to feedback.
Perhaps most alarming, it’s a story about a studio in crisis. Dozens of developers, many of them decade-long veterans, have left BioWare over the past two years. Some who have worked at BioWare’s longest-running office in Edmonton talk about depression and anxiety. Many say they or their co-workers had to take “stress leave”—a doctor-mandated period of weeks or even months worth of vacation for their mental health. One former BioWare developer told me they would frequently find a private room in the office, shut the door, and just cry. “People were so angry and sad all the time,” they said. Said another: “Depression and anxiety are an epidemic within Bioware.”
“I actually cannot count the amount of ‘stress casualties’ we had on Mass Effect: Andromeda or Anthem,” said a third former BioWare developer in an email. “A ‘stress casualty’ at BioWare means someone had such a mental breakdown from the stress they’re just gone for one to three months. Some come back, some don’t.”
EA and BioWare declined to comment on this story. [Update: See note at the bottom.]
Among those who work or have worked at BioWare, there’s a belief that something drastic needs to change. Many at the company now grumble that the success of 2014’s Dragon Age: Inquisition was one of the worst things that could have happened to them. The third Dragon Age, which won Game of the Year at the 2014 Game Awards, was the result of a brutal production process plagued by indecision and technical challenges. It was mostly built over the course of its final year, which led to lengthy crunch hours and lots of exhaustion. “Some of the people in Edmonton were so burnt out,” said one former BioWare developer. “They were like, ‘We needed [Dragon Age: Inquisition] to fail in order for people to realize that this isn’t the right way to make games.’”
Within the studio, there’s a term called “BioWare magic.” It’s a belief that no matter how rough a game’s production might be, things will always come together in the final months. The game will always coalesce. It happened on the Mass Effect trilogy, on Dragon Age: Origins, and on Inquisition. Veteran BioWare developers like to refer to production as a hockey stick—it’s flat for a while, and then it suddenly jolts upward. Even when a project feels like a complete disaster, there’s a belief that with enough hard work—and enough difficult crunch—it’ll all come together.
After the high-profile failures of Mass Effect Andromeda and Anthem, it has become clear to current and former BioWare employees that this attitude is no longer working. In recent years, BioWare has done serious damage to its reputation as a premier RPG developer. Maybe the hockey stick approach is no longer viable. Or maybe—just maybe—that sort of production practice was never really sustainable in the first place.
One thing’s for certain: On Anthem, BioWare’s magic ran out.
At the beginning, they called it Dylan. In late 2012 and 2013, while finishing up the Mass Effect trilogy, BioWare director Casey Hudson and a small team of longtime Mass Effect developers started work on a project that they hoped would be the Bob Dylan of video games, meaning something that would be referenced by video game fans for years to come. Even within BioWare, it was a mystery project—you needed a password to get into the wiki, according to one person who was on it. For a while, the team stayed small. Most of BioWare’s staff were on Dragon Age: Inquisition, which needed all hands on deck in order to ship by the end of 2014.
The early ideas for Dylan (which we’ll call Anthem from now on for clarity) were ambitious and changing constantly, according to people who were on the project. As is typical during this sort of “ideation” phase, nobody knew what the game would look like yet—they just wanted to see what might be cool. It would be an action game, certainly, and you’d be able to play it with your friends. The goal was to get away from traditional sci-fi and fantasy, so the game would feel distinct from Mass Effect and Dragon Age.
One concept that quickly emerged was the idea of a dangerous, hazard-filled planet. Anthem would be set on a hostile alien world, and in order to go out into the wilderness, you’d need a robot suit. A realistic, NASA-inspired robot suit. The pitch was simple: Iron Man, but less cartoony.
Early iterations of Anthem’s javelins were less Iron Man, more NASA
Over the months, a core concept started to crystallize: Anthem’s planet would be sort of like the Bermuda Triangle of this universe, with an inexorable gravity that was constantly pulling in alien ships and hazards. As a result, the world would be lethal and full of dangerous creatures. ”You are the bottom of the food chain, and everything is significantly more powerful than you,” said one person who worked on the game. When describing these early iterations of Anthem, developers have made comparisons to Dark Souls, Darkest Dungeon, even Shadow of the Colossus. There would be big, scary creatures out in the world, and your job would be to see how long you could survive. One prototype allowed the player to attach themselves to a giant monster; others centered on the atmosphere, the weather, and environmental effects.
“The idea was going to be that there were all these levers that could be pulled internally so there’d be different events happening at all times,” said a developer. “You’d be out somewhere, and an electrical storm would happen at random, and you had to survive it. We had an early demonstration of this where the environment was dynamic and by pulling levers we could change it from summer to winter to fall. You’d see the snow hitting the ground, hitting the trees… There were states of the build where that was being demonstrated, and that we could see this was something you could actually accomplish.”
We saw a small glimpse of these prototypes at E3 2014, when BioWare showed a teaser trailer for the as-yet-untitled game that would eventually become Anthem:
The final game would have nothing even close to those teases.
Anthem was always envisioned as an online multiplayer game, according to developers who worked on it, but it wasn’t always a loot shooter, the kind of game where you’d endlessly grind missions for new weapons. In these early versions, the idea was that you’d embark from a city and go out on expeditions with your friends, staying out in the world as long as you could survive. You’d use a robotic exosuit, and you’d fight monsters with melee and shooting attacks, but the focus was less on hoarding loot and more on seeing how long you could survive. One mission, for example, might take you and a squad to the center of a volcano, where you’d have to figure out why it was erupting, kill some creatures, and then fight your way back. “That was the main hook,” said an Anthem developer. “We’re going out as a team, going to try to accomplish something as a team, then come back and talk about it.” Along the way, you could scavenge or salvage alien ships for parts and bring them back to your base in order to upgrade your weapons or enhance your suit.
“It was really interesting,” said one person who worked on it. “It really struck a chord with a lot of the people who were working on it originally.”
What remained unclear during this process was how many of these ideas and prototypes would actually work at scale. Dynamic environments and giant creatures might perform nicely in a controlled environment, but would the Anthem team really be able to make those features work in an online, open-world game played by thousands and thousands of people? And would Frostbite, the volatile video game engine that BioWare was now using for all of its projects, really support all these features?
As these questions lingered, the Anthem team faced a major shake-up. In August of 2014, as they continued to prototype and dream about their game, they lost their leader. Casey Hudson, who had directed the beloved Mass Effect trilogy and was supposed to be creative director on Anthem, was departing. “The foundation of our new IP in Edmonton is complete,” he wrote in a letter to the studio, “and the team is ready to move forward into pre-production on a title that I think will redefine interactive entertainment.” Jon Warner, a relatively new hire who had worked for Disney before joining EA in 2011, took on the role of game director.
BioWare veterans liked to describe Casey Hudson’s Mass Effect team as the Enterprise from Star Trek: They all did what the captain said, and they were all laser-focused on a single destination. (By comparison, they called the Dragon Age team a pirate ship, meandering from port to port until it reached its final destination.) Now, the Enterprise no longer had its Jean-Luc Picard.
Still, members of the Anthem team say they remained happy. Dragon Age: Inquisition shipped at the end of 2014 to critical acclaim, and many of those developers moved over to Anthem, where they found a team full of high hopes and ambitious ideas. “EA had these team health reports,” said one. “Anthem’s morale was among the highest in all of EA. It was really, really good for quite a while. Everybody saw there was so much potential in those early prototypes. ‘Potential’ was always the word there.”
One BioWare developer who hadn’t yet moved to the Anthem team recalled hearing those colleagues talk about how much better they had it than the people who were stuck on Mass Effect: Andromeda, which at the time was going through serious struggles thanks to technical challenges and significant directional changes. Surely, they thought, that couldn’t happen to Anthem. “We took so much time to get the experience correct,” said another person who worked on the game. “I think that’s why morale was so high. I knew we had taken the time to really refine what we wanted the game to be about. Now we just had to go and produce it.”
Question was, how would they do that? As development progressed, it became clear that some of the Anthem team’s original ideas either wouldn’t work or weren’t quite solidified enough to be implemented. Take traversal, for example. The mandate was that Anthem’s world would be massive and seamless, but how would you get around? The team played around with prototypes, exploring different ways in which your exosuit could move vertically across the world. For a long time they thought it’d be climbing up the sides of mountains and ledges, but they couldn’t get that quite right. Early iterations of flying—which, developers say, was removed from and re-added to Anthem several times—were more like gliding, and members of the Anthem team say it was tough to get the system feeling all that fun. Every time they changed the traversal, it meant changing the world design accordingly, flattening and stretching terrain to accommodate the latest movement style.
There were experiments with procedural encounters, where dynamic creatures and environmental hazards would spawn randomly from the world, but those weren’t working too smoothly, either. “That took a long time,” said one developer. “The game was super reliant on this procedural system that just wasn’t fun.”
The story started changing drastically, too. In early 2015, veteran Dragon Age writer David Gaider moved over to Anthem, and his version of the story looked a lot different than the ideas with which they’d been experimenting for the past few years. Gaider’s style was traditional BioWare—big, complicated villains; ancient alien artifacts; and so on—which rankled some of the developers who were hoping for something more subtle. “There was a lot of resistance from the team who just didn’t want to see a sci-fi Dragon Age, I guess,” said one developer. Added a second: “A lot of people were like, ‘Why are we telling the same story? Let’s do something different.’”
When asked for comment on this, Gaider said in an email that when he’d started on the project, Anthem design director Preston Watamaniuk had pushed him in a “science-fantasy” direction. “I was fine with that, as fantasy is more my comfort zone anyhow, but it was clear from the outset that there was a lot of opposition to the change from the rest of the team,” he said. “Maybe they assumed the idea for it came from me, I’m not sure, but comments like ‘it’s very Dragon Age’ kept coming up regarding any of the work me or my team did... and not in a complimentary manner. There were a lot of people who wanted a say over Anthem’s story, and kept articulating a desire to do something ‘different’ without really being clear on what that was outside of it just not being anything BioWare had done before (which was, apparently, a bad thing?). From my perspective, it was rather frustrating.”
Gaider left BioWare in early 2016—“As time passed, I didn’t feel keen to play the game that I was working on,” he told me—which led to new writers for Anthem and a total story reboot. This led to even more chaos. “As you can imagine, writing for BioWare sets the foundation for all the games,” said one developer. “When writing is unsure of what it’s doing, it causes a lot of destruction to a lot of departments.”
Concept art for BioWare’s Anthem
Instability had become par for the course on the Anthem team, as Hudson’s departure left a void that proved tough to fill. The job of steering Anthem now fell to the creative leadership team, a group that included game director Jon Warner, design director Preston Watamaniuk, art director Derek Watts, animation director Parrish Ley, and a handful of other Mass Effect veterans who had been on Anthem since the beginning. Some current and former BioWare employees feel a lot of resentment toward this group, and in interviews, many who worked on Anthem accused the leadership team of indecision and mismanagement. “The root cause of all this was that lack of vision,” said one former BioWare developer. “What are we making? Please tell us. The recurring theme was there was no vision, there was no clarity, there was no single director saying, ‘This is how it all works together.’”
“They never seemed to settle on anything,” added that person. “They were always looking for something more, something new.” Said another: “I think most people on the team felt like we didn’t know exactly what the game was or what it was supposed to be because it kept changing so much.”
The most common anecdote relayed to me by current and former BioWare employees was this: A group of developers are in a meeting. They’re debating some creative decision, like the mechanics of flying or the lore behind the Scar alien race. Some people disagree on the fundamentals. And then, rather than someone stepping up and making a decision about how to proceed, the meeting would end with no real verdict, leaving everything in flux. “That would just happen over and over,” said one Anthem developer. “Stuff would take a year or two to figure out because no one really wanted to make a call on it.”
“Keep in mind,” said another Anthem developer, “everyone had hard decisions to make that we’ve never done before. New IP, new genre, new technology, new style, everything was new.”
Throughout 2015 and 2016, it appeared to the Anthem team that they were accomplishing very little. They struggled with the online infrastructure, they hadn’t figured out how missions would work, and while they had built a few environments and creatures, it still wasn’t clear exactly what the basic gameplay might look like. The story was changing constantly, and progress on the game grew sluggish. One early idea was that there would be multiple cities, which eventually turned into one city and player-created outposts, which eventually turned into one city and a mobile Strider base, which eventually turned into a single fort. Those earlier survival ideas melted away. “They were still figuring out core parts of the IP, like [crafting material] Ember, how technology worked, that sort of thing,” said one former BioWare developer. “The whole back-end architecture and everything wasn’t figured out yet.”
At the same time, BioWare’s studio leadership had to focus much of its attention on Mass Effect: Andromeda, a game that was causing headaches for just about everyone and whose rapidly approaching release date was set in stone. Put another way: Anthem might have started to look like it was on fire, but Andromeda was already nearly burnt to the ground.
Complicating these problems further was the fact that sometimes when the Anthem leadership team did make a decision, it could take weeks or even months for them to see it in action. “There were a lot of plans,” said a developer, “where by the time they were implemented it was a year later and the game had evolved.” The explanation for this lag can be summed up in one word, a word that has plagued many of EA’s studios for years now, most notably BioWare and the now-defunct Visceral Games, a word that can still evoke a mocking smile or sad grimace from anyone who’s spent any time with it.
That word, of course, is Frostbite.
“Frostbite is full of razor blades,” one former BioWare employee told me a few weeks ago, aptly summing up the feelings of perhaps hundreds of game developers who have worked at Electronic Arts over the past few years.
Frostbite is a video game engine, or a suite of technology that is used to make a game. Created by the EA-owned Swedish studio DICE in order to make Battlefield shooters, the Frostbite engine became ubiquitous across Electronic Arts this past decade thanks to an initiative led by former executive Patrick Söderlund to get all of its studios on the same technology. (By using Frostbite rather than a third-party engine like Unreal, those studios could share knowledge and save a whole lot of money in licensing fees.) BioWare first shifted to Frostbite for Dragon Age: Inquisition in 2011, which caused massive problems for that team. Many of the features those developers had taken for granted in previous engines, like a save-load system and a third-person camera, simply did not exist in Frostbite, which meant that the Inquisition team had to build them all from scratch. Mass Effect: Andromeda ran into similar issues. Surely the third time would be the charm?
As it turned out, Anthem was not the charm. Using Frostbite to build an online-only action game, which BioWare had never done before, led to a host of new problems for BioWare’s designers, artists, and programmers. “Frostbite is like an in-house engine with all the problems that entails—it’s poorly documented, hacked together, and so on—with all the problems of an externally sourced engine,” said one former BioWare employee. “Nobody you actually work with designed it, so you don’t know why this thing works the way it does, why this is named the way it is.”
Throughout those early years in development, the Anthem team realized that many of the ideas they’d originally conceived would be difficult if not impossible to create on Frostbite. The engine allowed them to build big, beautiful levels, but it just wasn’t equipped with the tools to support all of those ambitious prototypes that they’d created. Slowly and gradually, they started cutting back on the environmental and survival features that they’d devised for Anthem, in large part because they just weren’t working.
“Part of the trouble was you could do enough in the engine to hack it to show what was possible, but then to get the investment behind it to get it actually done took a lot longer, and in some cases you’d run into a brick wall,” said a BioWare developer. “Then you’d realize, ‘Oh my god, we can do this only if we reinvent the wheel, which is going to take too long.’ It was sometimes difficult to know when to cut and run.”
Even today, BioWare developers say Frostbite can make their jobs exponentially more difficult. Building new iterations on levels and mechanics can be challenging due to sluggish tools, while bugs that should take a few minutes to squash might require days of back-and-forth conversations. “If it takes you a week to make a little bug fix, it discourages people from fixing bugs,” said one person who worked on Anthem. “If you can hack around it, you hack around it, as opposed to fixing it properly.” Said a second: “I would say the biggest problem I had with Frostbite was how many steps you needed to do something basic. With another engine I could do something myself, maybe with a designer. Here it’s a complicated thing.”
“It’s hard enough to make a game,” said a third BioWare developer. “It’s really hard to make a game where you have to fight your own tool set all the time.”
From the beginning, Anthem’s senior leadership had made the decision to start from scratch for a large part of the game’s technology rather than using all of the systems the company had built for Inquisition and Andromeda. Part of this may have been a desire to stand out from those other teams, but another explanation was simple: Anthem was online. The other games were not. The inventory system that BioWare had already designed for Dragon Age on Frostbite might not stand up in an online game, so the Anthem team figured they’d need to build a new one. “Towards the end of the project we started complaining,” said one developer. “Maybe we would’ve gone further if we had Dragon Age: Inquisition stuff. But we’re also just complaining about lack of manpower in general.”
It often felt to the Anthem team like they were understaffed, according to that developer and others who worked on the game, many of whom told me their team was a fraction of the size of developers behind similar games, like Destiny and The Division. There were a number of reasons for this. One was that in 2016, the FIFA games had to move to Frostbite. The annual soccer franchise was EA’s most important series, bringing in a large chunk of the publisher’s revenue, and BioWare had programmers with Frostbite experience, so Electronic Arts shifted them to FIFA.
“A lot of the really talented engineers were actually working on FIFA when they should’ve been working on Anthem,” said one person who was on the project. There was also the fact that BioWare’s main office was located in Edmonton, a place where winters can dip to minus 20 or even minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit, which staff there say has always made it difficult to recruit veterans from more habitable cities. (One also has to wonder: How many programmers heard about Frostbite’s razor blades and decided to shy away?)
When a BioWare engineer had questions or wanted to report bugs, they’d usually have to talk to EA’s central Frostbite team, a group of support staff that worked with all of the publisher’s studios. Within EA, it was common for studios to battle for resources like the Frostbite team’s time, and BioWare would usually lose those battles. After all, role-playing games brought in a fraction of the revenue of a FIFA or a Battlefront. “The amount of support you’d get at EA on Frostbite is based on how much money your studio’s game is going to make,” said one developer. All of BioWare’s best-laid technological plans could go awry if they weren’t getting the help they expected.
No matter how many people were involved, one thing about Frostbite would always remain consistent, as it did on Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda: It made everything take longer than anyone thought it should. “We’re trying to make this huge procedural world but we’re constantly fighting Frostbite because that’s not what it’s designed to do,” said one developer. “Things like baking the lighting can take 24 hours. If we’re making changes to a level, we have to go through another bake process. It’s a very complex process.”
Frostbite’s razor blades were buried deeply inside the Anthem team, and it would prove impossible to stop the bleeding.
By the end of 2016, Anthem had been in some form of pre-production for roughly four years. After this much time in a more typical video game development cycle, it would have entered production, the point in a project when the team has a full vision of what they’re making and can actually start building out the game. Some who were working on Anthem say that’s when they started feeling like they were in trouble, like the game was screwed, like they would soon have to face the same sort of last-minute production crunch that their co-workers were suffering on Mass Effect: Andromeda. Yet word came down from leadership that everything would work out. It was time for BioWare magic. “You had to throw your prior knowledge out and either go on blind faith or just hope things were gonna turn out well,” said one person who was there. “A lot of the veterans, guys who had only ever worked at BioWare, they said, ‘Everything is going to be fine in the end.’ It was really hard on people who couldn’t just go on that blind faith, I suppose.”
One former BioWare developer said that they and some of their co-workers would bring up these concerns to directors, only to be ignored. “You’d come to management saying, ‘Look, we’re seeing the same problems on Inquisition and Andromeda, where design wasn’t figuring things out. It’s getting really late in the project and the core of the game isn’t defined.’ Basically saying, ‘Hey, the same mistakes are happening again, did you guys see this the last time? Can you stop this?’” said the developer. “They’d be quite dismissive about it.”
Over the months, Anthem had begun naturally picking up ideas and mechanics from loot shooters like The Division and Destiny, although even mentioning the word Destiny was taboo at BioWare. (Diablo III was the preferred reference point.) A few people who worked on the game said that trying to make comparisons to Destiny would elicit negative reactions from studio leadership. “We were told quite definitively, ‘This isn’t Destiny,’” said one developer. “But it kind of is. What you’re describing is beginning to go into that realm. They didn’t want to make those correlations, but at the same time, when you’re talking about fire teams, and going off and doing raids together, about gun combat, spells, things like that, well there’s a lot of elements there that correlate, that cross over.”
Because leadership didn’t want to discuss Destiny, that developer added, they found it hard to learn from what Bungie’s loot shooter did well. “We need to be looking at games like Destiny because they’re the market leaders,” the developer said. “They’re the guys who have been doing these things best. We should absolutely be looking at how they’re doing things.” As an example, the developer brought up the unique feel of Destiny’s large variety of guns, something that Anthem seemed to be lacking, in large part because it was being built by a bunch of people who had mostly made RPGs. “We really didn’t have the design skill to be able to do that,” they said. “There just wasn’t the knowledge base to be able to develop that kind of diversity.”
One longstanding BioWare tradition is for their teams to build demos that the staff could all take home during Christmas break, and it was Anthem’s turn during Christmas of 2016. By this point, BioWare’s leadership had decided to remove flying from the game—they just couldn’t figure out how to make it feel good—so the Christmas build took place on flat terrain. You’d run through a farm and shoot some aliens. Some on the team thought it was successful as a proof of concept, but others at BioWare said it felt dull and looked mundane.
In the beginning of 2017, a few important things happened. In early March, Mass Effect: Andromeda launched, freeing up the bulk of BioWare’s staff to join Anthem, including most of BioWare’s Austin office. The Montreal office began to quietly wind down and eventually closed, leaving BioWare as two entities rather than three.
Around the same time, Electronic Arts executive Patrick Söderlund, to whom BioWare’s leadership reported, played the Anthem Christmas demo. According to three people familiar with what happened, he told BioWare that it was unacceptable. (Söderlund did not respond to a request for comment.) He was particularly disappointed by the graphics. “He said, ‘This is not what you had promised to me as a game,’” said one person who was there. Then, those developers said, Söderlund summoned a group of high-level BioWare staff to fly out to Stockholm, Sweden and meet with developers at DICE, the studio behind Battlefield and Frostbite. (DICE would later bring in a strike team to help BioWare work out Frostbite kinks and make Anthem look prettier.)
Now it was time for a new build. “What began was six weeks of pretty significant crunch to do a demo specifically for Patrick Söderlund,” said one member of the team. They overhauled the art, knowing that the best way to impress Söderlund would be to make a demo that looked as pretty as possible. And, after some heated arguments, the Anthem team decided to put flying back in.
One biome, based on a volcano, was eventually cut from Anthem
(continua...)
Concept art from Anthem
Then, less than a week before the Los Angeles press conference held by BioWare’s parent company, Electronic Arts, word came down that securing the rights to the trademark would be too difficult. Beyond was ruled out. The leadership team quickly switched to one of their backup options, Anthem. But whereas Beyond had been indicative of what BioWare hoped the game would be—you’d go out beyond the walls of your fort and into the dangerous wilds around you—Anthem didn’t really mean much.
“Everybody was like, ‘Well, that doesn’t make any sense—what does this have to do with anything?’” said one person who worked on the game. Just days before their game’s announcement, the team at BioWare had a brand new name that nobody really understood.
Such a major last-minute upheaval might seem strange to an outside observer, but on Anthem, it was common. Very few things went right in the development of BioWare’s latest game, an online cooperative shooter that was first teased in mid-2012 but spent years floundering in pre-production. Many features weren’t finalized or implemented until the very final months, and to some who worked on the project, it wasn’t even clear what kind of game Anthem even was until that E3 demo in June of 2017, less than two years before it actually came out. Later, they came up with an explanation for the name: The game’s planet was enveloped by something called the Anthem of Creation, a powerful, mysterious force that left environmental cataclysms across the world.
When Anthem launched in February of 2019, it was panned by fans and critics. Today, it has a 55 on the review aggregation site Metacritic, BioWare’s lowest score since the company was founded in 1995. The developer once known for ambitious role-playing games like Dragon Age and the original Mass Effect trilogy has now released two critical flops in a row, following 2017's disappointing Mass Effect: Andromeda. Although hardcore fans have put their faith in BioWare to continue fixing Anthem’s bugs and improving its mechanics—especially since Bungie’s Destiny, a similar game, had a rough launch and eventually recovered—few were happy with the initial release. Anthem wasn’t just buggy and thin on content; it felt half-baked, like it hadn’t been play-tested and tweaked enough by developers with experience playing other loot shooters. In the weeks after launch, there appeared to be a major new problem every day.
Fans have speculated endlessly as to how Anthem went so awry. Was it originally a single-player role-playing game, like BioWare’s previous titles? Did EA force BioWare to make a Destiny clone? Did they strip out all of the good missions to sell later as downloadable content? Is the loot system secretly driven by an elaborate AI system that keeps track of everything you do so it can get you to spend more money on the game?
The answer to all of those questions is no.
This account of Anthem’s development, based on interviews with 19 people who either worked on the game or adjacent to it (all of whom were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about Anthem’s development), is a story of indecision and mismanagement. It’s a story of technical failings, as EA’s Frostbite engine continued to make life miserable for many of BioWare’s developers, and understaffed departments struggled to serve their team’s needs. It’s a story of two studios, one in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and another in Austin, Texas, that grew resentful toward one another thanks to a tense, lopsided relationship. It’s a story of a video game that was in development for nearly seven years but didn’t enter production until the final 18 months, thanks to big narrative reboots, major design overhauls, and a leadership team said to be unable to provide a consistent vision and unwilling to listen to feedback.
Perhaps most alarming, it’s a story about a studio in crisis. Dozens of developers, many of them decade-long veterans, have left BioWare over the past two years. Some who have worked at BioWare’s longest-running office in Edmonton talk about depression and anxiety. Many say they or their co-workers had to take “stress leave”—a doctor-mandated period of weeks or even months worth of vacation for their mental health. One former BioWare developer told me they would frequently find a private room in the office, shut the door, and just cry. “People were so angry and sad all the time,” they said. Said another: “Depression and anxiety are an epidemic within Bioware.”
“I actually cannot count the amount of ‘stress casualties’ we had on Mass Effect: Andromeda or Anthem,” said a third former BioWare developer in an email. “A ‘stress casualty’ at BioWare means someone had such a mental breakdown from the stress they’re just gone for one to three months. Some come back, some don’t.”
EA and BioWare declined to comment on this story. [Update: See note at the bottom.]
Among those who work or have worked at BioWare, there’s a belief that something drastic needs to change. Many at the company now grumble that the success of 2014’s Dragon Age: Inquisition was one of the worst things that could have happened to them. The third Dragon Age, which won Game of the Year at the 2014 Game Awards, was the result of a brutal production process plagued by indecision and technical challenges. It was mostly built over the course of its final year, which led to lengthy crunch hours and lots of exhaustion. “Some of the people in Edmonton were so burnt out,” said one former BioWare developer. “They were like, ‘We needed [Dragon Age: Inquisition] to fail in order for people to realize that this isn’t the right way to make games.’”
Within the studio, there’s a term called “BioWare magic.” It’s a belief that no matter how rough a game’s production might be, things will always come together in the final months. The game will always coalesce. It happened on the Mass Effect trilogy, on Dragon Age: Origins, and on Inquisition. Veteran BioWare developers like to refer to production as a hockey stick—it’s flat for a while, and then it suddenly jolts upward. Even when a project feels like a complete disaster, there’s a belief that with enough hard work—and enough difficult crunch—it’ll all come together.
After the high-profile failures of Mass Effect Andromeda and Anthem, it has become clear to current and former BioWare employees that this attitude is no longer working. In recent years, BioWare has done serious damage to its reputation as a premier RPG developer. Maybe the hockey stick approach is no longer viable. Or maybe—just maybe—that sort of production practice was never really sustainable in the first place.
One thing’s for certain: On Anthem, BioWare’s magic ran out.
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At the beginning, they called it Dylan. In late 2012 and 2013, while finishing up the Mass Effect trilogy, BioWare director Casey Hudson and a small team of longtime Mass Effect developers started work on a project that they hoped would be the Bob Dylan of video games, meaning something that would be referenced by video game fans for years to come. Even within BioWare, it was a mystery project—you needed a password to get into the wiki, according to one person who was on it. For a while, the team stayed small. Most of BioWare’s staff were on Dragon Age: Inquisition, which needed all hands on deck in order to ship by the end of 2014.
The early ideas for Dylan (which we’ll call Anthem from now on for clarity) were ambitious and changing constantly, according to people who were on the project. As is typical during this sort of “ideation” phase, nobody knew what the game would look like yet—they just wanted to see what might be cool. It would be an action game, certainly, and you’d be able to play it with your friends. The goal was to get away from traditional sci-fi and fantasy, so the game would feel distinct from Mass Effect and Dragon Age.
One concept that quickly emerged was the idea of a dangerous, hazard-filled planet. Anthem would be set on a hostile alien world, and in order to go out into the wilderness, you’d need a robot suit. A realistic, NASA-inspired robot suit. The pitch was simple: Iron Man, but less cartoony.
Early iterations of Anthem’s javelins were less Iron Man, more NASA
Over the months, a core concept started to crystallize: Anthem’s planet would be sort of like the Bermuda Triangle of this universe, with an inexorable gravity that was constantly pulling in alien ships and hazards. As a result, the world would be lethal and full of dangerous creatures. ”You are the bottom of the food chain, and everything is significantly more powerful than you,” said one person who worked on the game. When describing these early iterations of Anthem, developers have made comparisons to Dark Souls, Darkest Dungeon, even Shadow of the Colossus. There would be big, scary creatures out in the world, and your job would be to see how long you could survive. One prototype allowed the player to attach themselves to a giant monster; others centered on the atmosphere, the weather, and environmental effects.
“The idea was going to be that there were all these levers that could be pulled internally so there’d be different events happening at all times,” said a developer. “You’d be out somewhere, and an electrical storm would happen at random, and you had to survive it. We had an early demonstration of this where the environment was dynamic and by pulling levers we could change it from summer to winter to fall. You’d see the snow hitting the ground, hitting the trees… There were states of the build where that was being demonstrated, and that we could see this was something you could actually accomplish.”
We saw a small glimpse of these prototypes at E3 2014, when BioWare showed a teaser trailer for the as-yet-untitled game that would eventually become Anthem:
The final game would have nothing even close to those teases.
Anthem was always envisioned as an online multiplayer game, according to developers who worked on it, but it wasn’t always a loot shooter, the kind of game where you’d endlessly grind missions for new weapons. In these early versions, the idea was that you’d embark from a city and go out on expeditions with your friends, staying out in the world as long as you could survive. You’d use a robotic exosuit, and you’d fight monsters with melee and shooting attacks, but the focus was less on hoarding loot and more on seeing how long you could survive. One mission, for example, might take you and a squad to the center of a volcano, where you’d have to figure out why it was erupting, kill some creatures, and then fight your way back. “That was the main hook,” said an Anthem developer. “We’re going out as a team, going to try to accomplish something as a team, then come back and talk about it.” Along the way, you could scavenge or salvage alien ships for parts and bring them back to your base in order to upgrade your weapons or enhance your suit.
“It was really interesting,” said one person who worked on it. “It really struck a chord with a lot of the people who were working on it originally.”
What remained unclear during this process was how many of these ideas and prototypes would actually work at scale. Dynamic environments and giant creatures might perform nicely in a controlled environment, but would the Anthem team really be able to make those features work in an online, open-world game played by thousands and thousands of people? And would Frostbite, the volatile video game engine that BioWare was now using for all of its projects, really support all these features?
As these questions lingered, the Anthem team faced a major shake-up. In August of 2014, as they continued to prototype and dream about their game, they lost their leader. Casey Hudson, who had directed the beloved Mass Effect trilogy and was supposed to be creative director on Anthem, was departing. “The foundation of our new IP in Edmonton is complete,” he wrote in a letter to the studio, “and the team is ready to move forward into pre-production on a title that I think will redefine interactive entertainment.” Jon Warner, a relatively new hire who had worked for Disney before joining EA in 2011, took on the role of game director.
BioWare veterans liked to describe Casey Hudson’s Mass Effect team as the Enterprise from Star Trek: They all did what the captain said, and they were all laser-focused on a single destination. (By comparison, they called the Dragon Age team a pirate ship, meandering from port to port until it reached its final destination.) Now, the Enterprise no longer had its Jean-Luc Picard.
Still, members of the Anthem team say they remained happy. Dragon Age: Inquisition shipped at the end of 2014 to critical acclaim, and many of those developers moved over to Anthem, where they found a team full of high hopes and ambitious ideas. “EA had these team health reports,” said one. “Anthem’s morale was among the highest in all of EA. It was really, really good for quite a while. Everybody saw there was so much potential in those early prototypes. ‘Potential’ was always the word there.”
One BioWare developer who hadn’t yet moved to the Anthem team recalled hearing those colleagues talk about how much better they had it than the people who were stuck on Mass Effect: Andromeda, which at the time was going through serious struggles thanks to technical challenges and significant directional changes. Surely, they thought, that couldn’t happen to Anthem. “We took so much time to get the experience correct,” said another person who worked on the game. “I think that’s why morale was so high. I knew we had taken the time to really refine what we wanted the game to be about. Now we just had to go and produce it.”
“EA had these team health reports. Anthem’s morale was among the highest in all of EA. It was really really good for quite a while. Everybody saw there was so much potential in those early prototypes. ‘Potential’ was always the word there.”
- BioWare developer
- BioWare developer
Question was, how would they do that? As development progressed, it became clear that some of the Anthem team’s original ideas either wouldn’t work or weren’t quite solidified enough to be implemented. Take traversal, for example. The mandate was that Anthem’s world would be massive and seamless, but how would you get around? The team played around with prototypes, exploring different ways in which your exosuit could move vertically across the world. For a long time they thought it’d be climbing up the sides of mountains and ledges, but they couldn’t get that quite right. Early iterations of flying—which, developers say, was removed from and re-added to Anthem several times—were more like gliding, and members of the Anthem team say it was tough to get the system feeling all that fun. Every time they changed the traversal, it meant changing the world design accordingly, flattening and stretching terrain to accommodate the latest movement style.
There were experiments with procedural encounters, where dynamic creatures and environmental hazards would spawn randomly from the world, but those weren’t working too smoothly, either. “That took a long time,” said one developer. “The game was super reliant on this procedural system that just wasn’t fun.”
The story started changing drastically, too. In early 2015, veteran Dragon Age writer David Gaider moved over to Anthem, and his version of the story looked a lot different than the ideas with which they’d been experimenting for the past few years. Gaider’s style was traditional BioWare—big, complicated villains; ancient alien artifacts; and so on—which rankled some of the developers who were hoping for something more subtle. “There was a lot of resistance from the team who just didn’t want to see a sci-fi Dragon Age, I guess,” said one developer. Added a second: “A lot of people were like, ‘Why are we telling the same story? Let’s do something different.’”
When asked for comment on this, Gaider said in an email that when he’d started on the project, Anthem design director Preston Watamaniuk had pushed him in a “science-fantasy” direction. “I was fine with that, as fantasy is more my comfort zone anyhow, but it was clear from the outset that there was a lot of opposition to the change from the rest of the team,” he said. “Maybe they assumed the idea for it came from me, I’m not sure, but comments like ‘it’s very Dragon Age’ kept coming up regarding any of the work me or my team did... and not in a complimentary manner. There were a lot of people who wanted a say over Anthem’s story, and kept articulating a desire to do something ‘different’ without really being clear on what that was outside of it just not being anything BioWare had done before (which was, apparently, a bad thing?). From my perspective, it was rather frustrating.”
Gaider left BioWare in early 2016—“As time passed, I didn’t feel keen to play the game that I was working on,” he told me—which led to new writers for Anthem and a total story reboot. This led to even more chaos. “As you can imagine, writing for BioWare sets the foundation for all the games,” said one developer. “When writing is unsure of what it’s doing, it causes a lot of destruction to a lot of departments.”
Concept art for BioWare’s Anthem
Instability had become par for the course on the Anthem team, as Hudson’s departure left a void that proved tough to fill. The job of steering Anthem now fell to the creative leadership team, a group that included game director Jon Warner, design director Preston Watamaniuk, art director Derek Watts, animation director Parrish Ley, and a handful of other Mass Effect veterans who had been on Anthem since the beginning. Some current and former BioWare employees feel a lot of resentment toward this group, and in interviews, many who worked on Anthem accused the leadership team of indecision and mismanagement. “The root cause of all this was that lack of vision,” said one former BioWare developer. “What are we making? Please tell us. The recurring theme was there was no vision, there was no clarity, there was no single director saying, ‘This is how it all works together.’”
“They never seemed to settle on anything,” added that person. “They were always looking for something more, something new.” Said another: “I think most people on the team felt like we didn’t know exactly what the game was or what it was supposed to be because it kept changing so much.”
The most common anecdote relayed to me by current and former BioWare employees was this: A group of developers are in a meeting. They’re debating some creative decision, like the mechanics of flying or the lore behind the Scar alien race. Some people disagree on the fundamentals. And then, rather than someone stepping up and making a decision about how to proceed, the meeting would end with no real verdict, leaving everything in flux. “That would just happen over and over,” said one Anthem developer. “Stuff would take a year or two to figure out because no one really wanted to make a call on it.”
“Keep in mind,” said another Anthem developer, “everyone had hard decisions to make that we’ve never done before. New IP, new genre, new technology, new style, everything was new.”
Throughout 2015 and 2016, it appeared to the Anthem team that they were accomplishing very little. They struggled with the online infrastructure, they hadn’t figured out how missions would work, and while they had built a few environments and creatures, it still wasn’t clear exactly what the basic gameplay might look like. The story was changing constantly, and progress on the game grew sluggish. One early idea was that there would be multiple cities, which eventually turned into one city and player-created outposts, which eventually turned into one city and a mobile Strider base, which eventually turned into a single fort. Those earlier survival ideas melted away. “They were still figuring out core parts of the IP, like [crafting material] Ember, how technology worked, that sort of thing,” said one former BioWare developer. “The whole back-end architecture and everything wasn’t figured out yet.”
At the same time, BioWare’s studio leadership had to focus much of its attention on Mass Effect: Andromeda, a game that was causing headaches for just about everyone and whose rapidly approaching release date was set in stone. Put another way: Anthem might have started to look like it was on fire, but Andromeda was already nearly burnt to the ground.
Complicating these problems further was the fact that sometimes when the Anthem leadership team did make a decision, it could take weeks or even months for them to see it in action. “There were a lot of plans,” said a developer, “where by the time they were implemented it was a year later and the game had evolved.” The explanation for this lag can be summed up in one word, a word that has plagued many of EA’s studios for years now, most notably BioWare and the now-defunct Visceral Games, a word that can still evoke a mocking smile or sad grimace from anyone who’s spent any time with it.
That word, of course, is Frostbite.
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“Frostbite is full of razor blades,” one former BioWare employee told me a few weeks ago, aptly summing up the feelings of perhaps hundreds of game developers who have worked at Electronic Arts over the past few years.
Frostbite is a video game engine, or a suite of technology that is used to make a game. Created by the EA-owned Swedish studio DICE in order to make Battlefield shooters, the Frostbite engine became ubiquitous across Electronic Arts this past decade thanks to an initiative led by former executive Patrick Söderlund to get all of its studios on the same technology. (By using Frostbite rather than a third-party engine like Unreal, those studios could share knowledge and save a whole lot of money in licensing fees.) BioWare first shifted to Frostbite for Dragon Age: Inquisition in 2011, which caused massive problems for that team. Many of the features those developers had taken for granted in previous engines, like a save-load system and a third-person camera, simply did not exist in Frostbite, which meant that the Inquisition team had to build them all from scratch. Mass Effect: Andromeda ran into similar issues. Surely the third time would be the charm?
As it turned out, Anthem was not the charm. Using Frostbite to build an online-only action game, which BioWare had never done before, led to a host of new problems for BioWare’s designers, artists, and programmers. “Frostbite is like an in-house engine with all the problems that entails—it’s poorly documented, hacked together, and so on—with all the problems of an externally sourced engine,” said one former BioWare employee. “Nobody you actually work with designed it, so you don’t know why this thing works the way it does, why this is named the way it is.”
Throughout those early years in development, the Anthem team realized that many of the ideas they’d originally conceived would be difficult if not impossible to create on Frostbite. The engine allowed them to build big, beautiful levels, but it just wasn’t equipped with the tools to support all of those ambitious prototypes that they’d created. Slowly and gradually, they started cutting back on the environmental and survival features that they’d devised for Anthem, in large part because they just weren’t working.
“Part of the trouble was you could do enough in the engine to hack it to show what was possible, but then to get the investment behind it to get it actually done took a lot longer, and in some cases you’d run into a brick wall,” said a BioWare developer. “Then you’d realize, ‘Oh my god, we can do this only if we reinvent the wheel, which is going to take too long.’ It was sometimes difficult to know when to cut and run.”
“Frostbite is full of razor blades.”
- Former BioWare developer
- Former BioWare developer
Even today, BioWare developers say Frostbite can make their jobs exponentially more difficult. Building new iterations on levels and mechanics can be challenging due to sluggish tools, while bugs that should take a few minutes to squash might require days of back-and-forth conversations. “If it takes you a week to make a little bug fix, it discourages people from fixing bugs,” said one person who worked on Anthem. “If you can hack around it, you hack around it, as opposed to fixing it properly.” Said a second: “I would say the biggest problem I had with Frostbite was how many steps you needed to do something basic. With another engine I could do something myself, maybe with a designer. Here it’s a complicated thing.”
“It’s hard enough to make a game,” said a third BioWare developer. “It’s really hard to make a game where you have to fight your own tool set all the time.”
From the beginning, Anthem’s senior leadership had made the decision to start from scratch for a large part of the game’s technology rather than using all of the systems the company had built for Inquisition and Andromeda. Part of this may have been a desire to stand out from those other teams, but another explanation was simple: Anthem was online. The other games were not. The inventory system that BioWare had already designed for Dragon Age on Frostbite might not stand up in an online game, so the Anthem team figured they’d need to build a new one. “Towards the end of the project we started complaining,” said one developer. “Maybe we would’ve gone further if we had Dragon Age: Inquisition stuff. But we’re also just complaining about lack of manpower in general.”
It often felt to the Anthem team like they were understaffed, according to that developer and others who worked on the game, many of whom told me their team was a fraction of the size of developers behind similar games, like Destiny and The Division. There were a number of reasons for this. One was that in 2016, the FIFA games had to move to Frostbite. The annual soccer franchise was EA’s most important series, bringing in a large chunk of the publisher’s revenue, and BioWare had programmers with Frostbite experience, so Electronic Arts shifted them to FIFA.
“A lot of the really talented engineers were actually working on FIFA when they should’ve been working on Anthem,” said one person who was on the project. There was also the fact that BioWare’s main office was located in Edmonton, a place where winters can dip to minus 20 or even minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit, which staff there say has always made it difficult to recruit veterans from more habitable cities. (One also has to wonder: How many programmers heard about Frostbite’s razor blades and decided to shy away?)
When a BioWare engineer had questions or wanted to report bugs, they’d usually have to talk to EA’s central Frostbite team, a group of support staff that worked with all of the publisher’s studios. Within EA, it was common for studios to battle for resources like the Frostbite team’s time, and BioWare would usually lose those battles. After all, role-playing games brought in a fraction of the revenue of a FIFA or a Battlefront. “The amount of support you’d get at EA on Frostbite is based on how much money your studio’s game is going to make,” said one developer. All of BioWare’s best-laid technological plans could go awry if they weren’t getting the help they expected.
No matter how many people were involved, one thing about Frostbite would always remain consistent, as it did on Dragon Age: Inquisition and Mass Effect: Andromeda: It made everything take longer than anyone thought it should. “We’re trying to make this huge procedural world but we’re constantly fighting Frostbite because that’s not what it’s designed to do,” said one developer. “Things like baking the lighting can take 24 hours. If we’re making changes to a level, we have to go through another bake process. It’s a very complex process.”
Frostbite’s razor blades were buried deeply inside the Anthem team, and it would prove impossible to stop the bleeding.
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By the end of 2016, Anthem had been in some form of pre-production for roughly four years. After this much time in a more typical video game development cycle, it would have entered production, the point in a project when the team has a full vision of what they’re making and can actually start building out the game. Some who were working on Anthem say that’s when they started feeling like they were in trouble, like the game was screwed, like they would soon have to face the same sort of last-minute production crunch that their co-workers were suffering on Mass Effect: Andromeda. Yet word came down from leadership that everything would work out. It was time for BioWare magic. “You had to throw your prior knowledge out and either go on blind faith or just hope things were gonna turn out well,” said one person who was there. “A lot of the veterans, guys who had only ever worked at BioWare, they said, ‘Everything is going to be fine in the end.’ It was really hard on people who couldn’t just go on that blind faith, I suppose.”
One former BioWare developer said that they and some of their co-workers would bring up these concerns to directors, only to be ignored. “You’d come to management saying, ‘Look, we’re seeing the same problems on Inquisition and Andromeda, where design wasn’t figuring things out. It’s getting really late in the project and the core of the game isn’t defined.’ Basically saying, ‘Hey, the same mistakes are happening again, did you guys see this the last time? Can you stop this?’” said the developer. “They’d be quite dismissive about it.”
Over the months, Anthem had begun naturally picking up ideas and mechanics from loot shooters like The Division and Destiny, although even mentioning the word Destiny was taboo at BioWare. (Diablo III was the preferred reference point.) A few people who worked on the game said that trying to make comparisons to Destiny would elicit negative reactions from studio leadership. “We were told quite definitively, ‘This isn’t Destiny,’” said one developer. “But it kind of is. What you’re describing is beginning to go into that realm. They didn’t want to make those correlations, but at the same time, when you’re talking about fire teams, and going off and doing raids together, about gun combat, spells, things like that, well there’s a lot of elements there that correlate, that cross over.”
Because leadership didn’t want to discuss Destiny, that developer added, they found it hard to learn from what Bungie’s loot shooter did well. “We need to be looking at games like Destiny because they’re the market leaders,” the developer said. “They’re the guys who have been doing these things best. We should absolutely be looking at how they’re doing things.” As an example, the developer brought up the unique feel of Destiny’s large variety of guns, something that Anthem seemed to be lacking, in large part because it was being built by a bunch of people who had mostly made RPGs. “We really didn’t have the design skill to be able to do that,” they said. “There just wasn’t the knowledge base to be able to develop that kind of diversity.”
One longstanding BioWare tradition is for their teams to build demos that the staff could all take home during Christmas break, and it was Anthem’s turn during Christmas of 2016. By this point, BioWare’s leadership had decided to remove flying from the game—they just couldn’t figure out how to make it feel good—so the Christmas build took place on flat terrain. You’d run through a farm and shoot some aliens. Some on the team thought it was successful as a proof of concept, but others at BioWare said it felt dull and looked mundane.
In the beginning of 2017, a few important things happened. In early March, Mass Effect: Andromeda launched, freeing up the bulk of BioWare’s staff to join Anthem, including most of BioWare’s Austin office. The Montreal office began to quietly wind down and eventually closed, leaving BioWare as two entities rather than three.
Around the same time, Electronic Arts executive Patrick Söderlund, to whom BioWare’s leadership reported, played the Anthem Christmas demo. According to three people familiar with what happened, he told BioWare that it was unacceptable. (Söderlund did not respond to a request for comment.) He was particularly disappointed by the graphics. “He said, ‘This is not what you had promised to me as a game,’” said one person who was there. Then, those developers said, Söderlund summoned a group of high-level BioWare staff to fly out to Stockholm, Sweden and meet with developers at DICE, the studio behind Battlefield and Frostbite. (DICE would later bring in a strike team to help BioWare work out Frostbite kinks and make Anthem look prettier.)
Now it was time for a new build. “What began was six weeks of pretty significant crunch to do a demo specifically for Patrick Söderlund,” said one member of the team. They overhauled the art, knowing that the best way to impress Söderlund would be to make a demo that looked as pretty as possible. And, after some heated arguments, the Anthem team decided to put flying back in.
One biome, based on a volcano, was eventually cut from Anthem
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